I did not find it odd or even a sign of our somewhat low socio-economic status that the family did not have books in the house when I grew up. I read a lot of books, but I saw little point in buying them. Books came from the library. Once I read a book, I thought then that I would never re-read it, but if I did, I could check it out again. Buying a book was just a waste of money.

Even so, I did buy at least one book. I was a member of some Junior Astronomy club in those post-Sputnik days and subscribed to “Sky and Telescope” magazine. I understood little of what was covered in the issues. In the reverse of the “Playboy” line, I got it for the pictures, which I found mesmerizing. The magazine gave me the fantasy of building my own telescope, and there was an ad in the back of “Sky and Telescope” for a book on how to do that. The Mead Public Library of Sheboygan, not surprisingly, did not have that book, and I had not heard of interlibrary loans back then. Instead, I decided to buy the book. There wasn’t a real bookstore in town, but a store that mostly sold greeting cards and knick-knacks had a rack or two of paperbacks, and I learned that I could order a book there. After saving allowance and grass-cutting money, I acquired a book on how to grind the lens for a reflecting telescope as well as other important stuff for the telescope-building business. (I never did build it, but my parents bought me a telescope. My chief discovery was how quickly the earth seemed to rotate when I looked at a heavenly object. The image would stay within the viewfinder for only a short time. I learned that I needed counterweights and a clock drive, and all that was beyond me. But, still, I remember how thrilling it was to see the mountains and “seas” of the moon.)

Prange’s, the local department store, had a shelf or two of books, and there I spotted biographies of sports heroes that were not in the public library. This presented a quandary. I did want to read them, and unlike the telescope book, which I thought would be a reference I needed, I did not want to buy them. My solution was to–I don’t want to call it shoplifting—let’s say, whisk a desired book out the store. As soon as I finished it, I would smuggle it back in and carefully place it in the exact spot it had been in before I had “borrowed” it. This was probably the height of reading being a forbidden pleasure for me, and I never got caught doing this.

College changed these patterns. I bought the books for my courses, and now I wanted to retain the books. Having read Tocqueville, Dostoyevsky, or Kant, keeping those books seemed like a symbol of emerging intellectual maturity. I imagined that they kind of person I wanted to be would have a personal library. I didn’t sell the college books back. I still have a few of them.

I mostly remember university bookstores in those days of my formal education although I have a faint memory of Kroch’s and Brentano’s in downtown Chicago where I went to law school. It was not, however, until I began my post-education life in New York City that bookstores really came into my life.

Barnes & Noble was the most important bookstore for me in my early New York days. B & N had but one location then—on 5^th Avenue near 17^th Street—selling both new and used books. I remember it as a warren of rooms and shelves. If I said to a clerk as I entered–in days long before computer inventories–that I was looking for a particular book on Chinese history, the employee might reply, “If we have it, go to our Chinese section. Walk through this room and turn right in the next room and when you get in the next room after that, go past the Roman philosophy racks, and you will see that the bottom two racks of the next bookcase are Chinese history.” And it was amazing what they had. (To be continued.)

When my young friend turned around, I could not help but notice the shiner under his left eye. Some guys tried to rob him as he got out of his car. A scuffle ensued, with my friend adamantly maintaining that he got in some good blows, but clearly, he also took one. The would-be robbers ran off when a shopkeeper came out of his store, and my friend lost nothing. I commiserated with him and told him about various incidents involving me, the spouse, and the daughter. I asked him if his girlfriend had been with him. “No,” he said, but he saw her the next day. He said that she had been very sympathetic. He hesitated for a moment. A slight grin appeared—his first smile of the evening. Then he said, “Sympathetic sex is very good.”

“To me, the movie [It’s a Wonderful Life] meant that if you become unhappy enough, almost anything can pass as happiness.” Akhil Sharma, Family Life.

I was looking in a bookstore window a few blocks from the theater when I heard three men walking past me discussing the Romanian film I had just seen. One said something about Roman, the main character, and continued by asking, “How could he do that to his beautiful girlfriend?” One of the other men maintained, “She was not that beautiful.” And then the trio of men, without any women accompanying them, drifted out of ear shot.

A man stumbled on the corner. His legs would not hold him up. He fell. With much effort, he got up. He weaved about. He fell again. Two women crossing the street came up to him where he lay in the gutter of the crosswalk. They tried to help him stand. He had a slight build, but he was too much for them. Quickly the cook from the nearby Middle Eastern restaurant came out and helped the man to walk a few yards to a stoop where he could sit. A server from the restaurant brought out a glass of water and a cup of coffee. Shortly afterwards, the cook and one of the women helped the man, who had an expensive-looking haircut, into the restaurant. Someone had called emergency services, which arrived in a few minutes. The two emergency services workers loaded him on to a gurney and then into the back of an ambulance, which drove off. One of the restaurant patrons who had gone over to the disabled man said that he had taken ketamine, a horse tranquilizer. During the entire time, the man had a death grip on his telephone held in front of his chest.

Remember “crack babies”? Twenty years ago, the press was filled with stories about children being born to mothers addicted to crack cocaine, often somewhat politely called “crack mothers,” but often labeled “crack whores.” The kids were supposedly permanently damaged and would harm society for generations to come. So, they should be harming us inordinately right now. Why don’t we hear about that? Is it because those scare stories weren’t true? And a quick experiment. Imagine a “crack baby” or a “crack mother.” Did any of you see a white woman or white child?

Someone who had known me for decades said, “When I first met you, I thought you were incredibly arrogant—the kind of person who thought his feces did not stink.” He pronounced “feces” with a hard “c”.

A friend is on a conservative email list. The friend, at my request, now forwards to me these emails, which average four or five a week. Some are cartoons or videos—often quite funny. Some are straight-out opinion pieces. Others, however, are filled with purported facts. I have gotten in the habit of checking the “facts.” It takes little time to do this. Usually a few key words entered into a search engine reveal something about the assertions. More often they reveal something about the particular piece that was sent around because what is distributed is never anything original by the group, but always a forwarded article composed, often years ago, by someone outside the circle, although the original author of the essay is seldom given.

I started this process because often it seemed clear that an asserted “fact” could not be true, or was, at least, unlikely. Some were so obviously fishy that it surprised me that anyone could take the “fact” seriously.

My restraint in keeping the checking to myself was finally broken when a forwarded message purported to reproduce telegrams between General Douglas MacArthur and President Harry Truman on the eve of the signing of Japan’s surrender at the end of WWII. The author of the piece was not given, but he authoritatively stated that the original telegrams were in Truman’s presidential library and not a word had been changed.

MacArthur, according to the account, sent a telegram to the President that contained what would now be considered racist terms describing the Japanese. Truman responded by telling the General that he could not use such terms with the press because the terms were not “politically correct.” MacArthur then expressed bewilderment at what “politically correct” meant, and Truman replied, according to this account, on September 1, 1945, writing, “Political Correctness is a doctrine, recently fostered by a delusional, illogical minority and promoted by a sick mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a piece of shit by the clean end!”

Do you wonder if Truman actually wrote that? You don’t have to be a genius to question it, but you do have to be a lot less than that to simply accept it. When did you first hear the term “politically correct”? When did you first hear the term “mainstream media”? I punched a few words from the supposed telegraphic exchange into Google, and I found that the inauthenticity of the telegrams had been exposed many times in the last few years. The words had not been written. The telegrams  were not in any Truman archives.

I wrote to my friend who had forwarded me the message: “This is lame. If it is meant to be satire, it fails for lack of humor. If it is supposed to delude people into thinking it is true, anyone with a modicum of historical sensibility or of critical sensibility would never give this unquestioning acceptance. It is sad if this needs debunking, but apparently it does, and it has been debunked many times. For example: http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/trumanpc.asp.”

I also, however, sent it to recipients of the email that “reproduced” the MacArthur-Truman exchange. I got no response from anyone on that extensive list. Instead, the next email to this group started with an admonition that the emails should not be forwarded to unsympathetic people, and the addresses of the recipients were now blocked. Surprise, surprise! These people did not want to know if what they passed around had been debunked. They were indifferent to the truth. Or in Franfortian terms, they were content to eat bullshit.

This group is not alone in that desire. Many in our society are happy to receive bullshit. Even though it is often easy now to do some checking for accuracy, they don’t do it. They are, too often, indifferent to the truth. If many are willing to consume bullshit, it is not surprising that others are willing to provide it.

Of course, we get bullshit on many different topics—often about personalities in popular culture, for example—and there is bullshit throughout the political spectrum, but I don’t think it is bullshit to believe that never before have we had a President who has provided so much, so regularly. And perhaps we have never before had so many people not just willing to accept it, but seemingly to desire it.

This should lead us to think about what this pervasive political bullshit culture will do to our country as the steaming bullshit mounds will reach increasingly unprecedented heights in the coming years. For example, Frankfort maintains that cultural conditions and epistemological beliefs can help spread bullshit. It proliferates where it is denied that “we can have reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things really are.” But isn’t it also likely that the proliferation of bullshit and its acceptance will also lead to more people believing that there is no reliable access to an objective reality and no way of knowing how things truly are? And if that happens, haven’t we entered a bullshit spiral from which we might never escape?

And perhaps after discussing Frankfort’s On Bullshit, the time is nigh to discuss Aaron James’s book, Assholes: A Theory.

President Donald Trump told a lie. That gets reported almost every day, or more likely several times every day. Some news outlets give us the cumulative total since Inauguration Day. One source has him uttering more than 1600 different lies since he became President.

I find myself almost pulling for more lies. Two thousand would be a nice, memorable number that would be easy to compare as next year’s total begins. I feel a little like I did in a harsh winter a few years back. Snowy day after snowy day. Ice was everywhere. A fall on the sidewalk always seemed imminent. Roads were close to impassable. Then at the end of winter another storm was approaching. The weather reporters said that it might veer north and not hit us, but I felt bizarre because I was welcoming it. If it hit us, we were going to hit an all-time record for the yearly snowfall. If I had to suffer as I had most of the winter, at least it should be a record year.

Having listened to so many Presidential lies, I, again, want this storm of lies to be memorable. To say that the total lies was more than 1,600 is more forgettable than if he gets the total over 2,000.

But as I have been wanting even more lies to get there—he might have to slightly increase the pace, but I had great confidence that he could reach 2,000—I started to remember something I had read a few years back, and I started to doubt whether President Trump really told any lies. So, I re-read Harry G. Frankfort’s marvelous little book, On Bullshit.

Frankfort makes a convincing distinction between bullshit and lies. Lying requires a degree of craftsmanship to get the lie accepted, and it also takes a concern for the truth. “In order to invent a lie at all, [the liar] must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth.”

The liar, thus, has a concern for the truth. The bullshitter does not. A bullshitter’s “statement is grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.” And since our President does not seem to craft lies as much as utter falsehoods with an indifference to the truth, he is not liar. Stop calling him that! He is a bullshitter.

The bullshitter has more freedom than the liar. The bullshit artist “does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a certain point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared, as far as required, to fake the context as well.” Frankfort continues, “He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”

Many wonder how Trump can tell so many falsehoods, or how he can repeat falsehoods that have been repeatedly debunked, or how he can assert things that on their face are blatantly false. Their outrage stems from their mistaken assumption that they are both playing I Spy, when Trump is really playing Pin the Tail (or in this case, Tale) on the Donkey. While a liar and truth-teller are on opposite sides in the same game, the bullshitter is not rejecting the authority of truth, as the liar does. Instead, “he pays no attention to it at all.”

If Trump lied, he would not be as dangerous. Frankfort writes, “By virtue of [not paying attention to the truth], bullshit is the greater enemy of the truth than lies are. . . . Through excessive indulgence in [bullshit], which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person’s normal habit of attending to the ways things are may become attenuated or lost.”

There may be many causes for Trump’s bullshit—his narcissistic ego may be the prime reason, but there is at least another one. “Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.” Those of us concerned with the truth should give up the notion that Trump will learn what is true and what is not and that the falsehoods will decrease over time. As long as Trump continues to talk about things he knows little to nothing about, the bullshit will continue.

But the bullshit will also continue because many of us simply do not want to grapple with determining what is true. A sizeable portion of the population does not care whether what a speaker says is true or not, much less whether the speaker believes what he says is true or that he knows, like the liar, that it is not true. A sizeable audience is indifferent to how things really are. In other words, this group is content to be fed bullshit, and that almost guarantees that bullshit will proliferate. (To be continued.)

“I am Misha Borisovich Vainberg, age thirty, a grossly overweight man with small, deeply set blue eyes, a pretty Jewish beak that brings to mind the most distinguished breed of parrot, and lips so delicate you would want to wipe them with the naked back of your hand.” Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan.

“By all rights, Times Square should have been called Oscar Hammerstein Square.” Anthony Bianco, Ghosts of 42^nd Street: A History of America’s Most Infamous Block.

“The city had converted an elevated length of abandoned railway spur into an aerial greenway and the agent and I were walking south along it in the unseasonable warmth after an outrageously expensive celebratory meal in Chelsea that included baby octopuses the chef had literally massaged to death.” Ben Lerner, 10:04.

“That God created mankind, male and female, in his own image is a matter of faith.” Jack Miles God: A Biography.

“The accused, Kabuo Miyamoto, sat proudly upright with rigid grace, his palms placed softly on the defendant’s table—the posture of a man who has detached himself insofar as that is possible at his own trial.” David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars.

“The Civil War started in darkness.” John Strausbaugh, City of Sedition: The History of New York City During the Civil War.

“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meaney.” John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meaney.

“’Oysters! Oysters! Beautiful oysters,” trumpeted a headline in a Batavia, New York, newspaper in 1824.” Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862.

“We are at rest five miles behind the front.” Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front.

“When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister’s address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money.” Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie.

A bout a decade ago a colleague was arrested for having pornographic images of children on his computer. He was labeled a “child pornographer.” I later did some work in a couple of public defender offices that represented others who had been arrested for obscene and disturbing pictures of children on their computers. They, too, were “child pornographers.” I wondered that since we called those who looked at the images child pornographers, what we should call those who create the images and those who sell them after they are created. However, when I saw arrests for such conduct, these people also were called child pornographers. One term was used to describe what to me were related but quite different behaviors. The same term for all the conduct tended to make all the offenders seem to be equally heinous.

With drugs our societal labels make a distinction among smugglers and manufacturers, wholesalers, retail sellers, and users, but seemingly not with child pornography. The person who forces children into poses or photographs them while they are being raped should be labeled differently because their behavior is different from a person who has downloaded images. Language can help create useful distinctions, but when the language is overbroad, it can blur needed distinctions. The term “child pornographer” indiscriminately used for different behaviors is a language failure.

Perhaps for child pornography, we might just use the terms that are used for drug offenders and say that there are manufacturers, sellers, and possessors of child pornography. The child pornography industry, however, differs from the drug trade in important ways, and the same labels used for both sets of offenders might blur those distinctions. Thus, the grower, smuggler, or the manufacturer of drugs does not intrinsically harm someone in their activities, but surely the maker of the child pornography always creates victims who may suffer for the rest of their lives. The creators of child pornography aren’t simply akin to Walter White when he cooks meth.

The possessors of child pornography also differ from the drug user. The drug user pays to get the drugs. This is the reason we have drug growers, smugglers, and sellers. The drug user, because he buys drugs, is at least partially responsible for the drug cartels and the gangs that smuggle, distribute, and sell drugs with all their attendant harms, including much violence.

Only some collectors of child pornography have bought the images. These paying customers are like the drug user in that they are part of a child pornography chain, from the rapes, kidnapping, and beatings of children to the retailing and selling of the images. Perhaps some sick people would still create child pornography if there were no market for it, but surely there would be less of it.

Some child pornography possessors, however, have not bought the images. They are like my colleague. In yet another wonder of the Internet, they have found ways to collect images online without paying. My colleague wanted to believe that, therefore, he was not doing any harm to anyone else, and tried to convince himself that what he had done should not have been considered criminal. While he did not do the harm of adding money to the pornography commerce, I became convinced that his conduct was still harmful. After my colleague went to jail, I read an article by a woman who was a victim of child pornography. She said that every time she learned of a person possessing an image of her, she felt a new violation. That makes sense to me, and while I might like to legalize the possession of drugs because the user of drugs may primarily hurt himself, legalization should never happen for the possession of child pornography.

While the use of the one term “child pornographer” for all those involved in the making, selling, and possession of the images blurs distinctions and helps to equate the harm of the child rapist with the lonely man peering at a computer, the drug trade terms don’t work for child pornography either. Our language is just deficient.

These thoughts about the term “child pornographer” have come back because of the recent avalanche of headlines about sexual harassment.  My first thoughts about this cavalcade of news have been mostly shocked wonder at our society. I, of course, knew sexual harassment existed, but not how pervasive it is. All this news had led me to think that a good starting assumption is that all men are pigs. And many are worse. I hope that we will learn that behavior that too many of us men think is cute or funny or seductive is rightfully seen by women as degrading and threatening and just an exercise of power.

Even so and even though our society would be better if all such behavior were eliminated, should we lump all of it under the one label of “sexual harassment”? I have seen that term used for drugging women in order to have sex with them; grabbing a breast in a private place; suggesting that a blow job will enhance job prospects; placing the hand on a buttock in a public place; exposing a penis to a woman alone in the office; molesting a fourteen-year-old girl; making lewd comments in a workplace; making lewd comments on the street; and so on. At least to me, this behavior includes the bad, the awful, and the despicable. Lumping it all under the same term, however, makes the despicable seem not quite as bad and makes the bad seem worse.

But for headlines and stories that must be succinct, we don’t have the ready language to make the distinctions. Once again, our language is deficient.

I represented many people charged with drug offenses. While all the cases involved controlled substances, one indiscriminate label was not used for every offender. Instead, in both the legal and public eye, a basic distinction was made between sellers and users of drugs. Sellers deserved, and got, more punishment than mere users..

Furthermore, both the possessor and seller categories had gradations by amounts. The greater the quantity sold, the more serious the offense. If I told a colleague that I had just been assigned a “sale case,” the immediate response invariably was, “How much?” That meant how much was the weight of the drugs allegedly sold. The seriousness of possession cases, too, was measured by amounts, but for a different reason. Possessing more drugs was not necessarily worse than possessing a lesser amount if the drugs were to be used by the possessor, but the assumption was that a person possessing a large quantity of drugs was not likely just planning to use those drugs personally. Instead, the possession of the large amount indicated that the person was really a seller, Thus, because he possessed with intent to sell, he should be punished more like a seller than a user. Once again, both the law and popular culture tried to distinguish among the drug offenses.

In state court, I never dealt with what is often seen as a third category of drug offenders—the importer or the smuggler. Perhaps this category also includes the manufacturer of a drug—think the TV series Breaking Bad, or perhaps Walter White is a fourth category. We could simply call the smuggler or the meth cooker a “drug seller,” for they will sell their product, but that does not suffice. That label would lump the smuggler or the manufacturer with the street corner seller of heroin, cocaine, or meth, and we all know that the smuggler’s or manufacturer’s conduct is vastly different from a “clocker’s.”  (If you are not familiar with that term, or even if you are, I highly recommend Clockers by Richard Price.)

My point is that we almost instinctively make what seem like natural distinctions among drug offenses and do not put the same label on all offenders. This does not mean the gradations perfectly capture all the distinctions. For example, I represented a woman who was a user of drugs and, not surprisingly, a prostitute in what was then a scruffy part of Brooklyn. An undercover police officer “befriended” her and offered her $50 dollars if she would lead him to people that would sell him a kilo of heroin. After much beseeching by him, and after she made some inquiries, she led the cop to some major drug dealers in Harlem who sold a kilo to the cop. She was charged with acting in concert with the major drug dealer although all agreed she stood to get only $50 from the transaction. For that she got a life sentence.

The drug gradations may not have been perfect, but it is right, and seemingly natural, that we make these distinctions. We recognize that all the behavior concerning drugs should not be lumped together. But that has not been true for child pornography. (To be continued.)

Driving to Pennsylvania on Cyber Monday, I saw a USPS truck tailgating a UPS truck. I expected a joke to pop into my mind. It didn’t

I read the Bible fairly often. I have read much Shakespeare and have seen many performances of his plays. Yet, to my deep regret, I can quote from memory little of the Bible or Shakespeare.

“Which proved to me yet again that traveling in the hinterland of the United States now and then resembled traveling in the wider world, listening to pious and irrational simplicities from credulous folks.” Paul Theroux, Deep South.

Am I the only one who thinks that if John Denver had lived longer he would have ended up looking something like Jeff Sessions?

I came out of the magic show and saw that a goodly portion of the audience had congregated outside the entrance. Some were listening to what others stated. Some of the speakers were pontificating with certitude while others spoke more tentatively, but all were giving versions of how the illusions had been done. I just walked away. I have read books and watched shows about magicians and how certain illusions are created, but I go to a magic show to be amazed and astounded, and I want those feelings to last further than the exit door. If I have the desire to try to figure out the secrets of the illusions, I can wait at least twenty-four hours.

I just learned that Norman Rockwell, the famous illustrator of American home life, and his first wife practiced free love. Perhaps you already knew that. If not, would you now look at his illustrations any differently?

After the recent Texas mass shooting of the churchgoers (sad that we can’t just refer to recent mass shooting but need to be more specific), those who oppose gun control trumpet the fact that the armed services did not report the shooter’s conviction and mental health issues, stuff that would have prevented him from buying guns. “We need to enforce our laws, not more laws” is the refrain. But doesn’t this position concede that gun control can work?

What should I do? The man with a prosthesis in a TV ad says, “I gave my leg for your freedom.” I want to support him, but I have doubts about his statement.

From past Thanksgivings, I had just thought he was boring, but the conversationally-challenged, retired detective became different when I asked him if there were any of his cases that still haunted him. He began to talk about a twenty-five-year-old murder of a marine. He had found the cold-case file almost a decade afterwards, concluded that the investigation had been shoddy, and started his own investigation. As a result, he said he knew who had orchestrated the killing (the wife) and who had been the main trigger man (the wife’s brother), but after efforts over several years, he could not prove it. As he talked over the turkey and cranberries, he went on and on, dredging up more and more details that a non-obsessed person would long ago forgotten. We may all have things that haunt us, but few are as haunted as he is.

I had my right shoulder replaced. If I understand what happened, the surgeon took the joint apart, cut off the ball part of arm bone, hauled out the bone reamer and made a hole in that long bone, jammed a piece of metal with a ball on it into the opening, repaired damage to the socket part of the joint, and then reassembled everything. After a few days in the hospital, I went home to confront many lessons.

This was my fourth shoulder surgery, and I learned yet again how difficult it is to sleep with my arm in a sling and how hard it is to sleep when any weight on the right shoulder would wake me up. I was reminded yet again about pain, and how thankful I was that the pain I had was not going to be a chronic condition. I knew my pain would continually lessen. I can’t imagine what it is like for those who have pain that never leaves. I learned that my pain and discomfort can bring on self-pity even though for reasons that I don’t understand, I try not to show the pain to others or ask for assistance unless it can’t be helped. I learned that the pain in rehabilitation can be seen as a challenge. As long as I can see progress that I can measure in movement or strength, the pain becomes more tolerable.

Knee surgeries had brought similar reactions to pain, but the shoulder replacement had me confront some new experiences since it restricted the use of my dominant arm. I was ordered not to raise my hand above my waist for a month or to carry anything in my right hand that weighed more than a few ounces. I did not instinctively comply, and I learned how much I normally use my right hand and how little my left for even the most mundane of tasks. I found myself routinely starting to reach for a kitchen drawer or cabinet with my dominant hand. I found that I had almost never used my left hand for something as quotidian as drinking coffee. I found I had to readjust how I dried myself off after a shower. I found that my teeth did not feel as well-brushed with my left hand. Not surprisingly I did not feel clean and refreshed using my left hand after visiting the bathroom. (I think I put that delicately enough, and I know that in some cultures you are not supposed to use your right hand for this function, but I don’t live in one of those cultures.) I saw no point in shaving with my left hand and grew a beard.

And then there was another biological function that I found hard to do with my nondominant hand. I finally talked to the doctor about it. I said, “I find it basically impossible to masturbate with my left.” The doctor almost shouted, “Stop doing it!” I replied, “I know that it is not entirely usual at my age, but it is still normal.” “You have got to stop!” “Why?” She replied, “Because I am trying to examine you!”

(Yes, I am embarrassed by that joke. Not because of its subject matter, but because it is not original, and I have tried to have everything my own in this blog that I don’t explicitly say is from another source. I have broken that rule this time, but perhaps it is ok because even though the joke is recycled, it applied. After all, my surgeon was a woman.)

“Rebecca Rose felt about Park Slope the same way she felt about her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Abbie: basic unconditional love mixed with frequent spurts of uncontrollable rage.” Amy Sohn, Prospect Park West.

“I’m here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don’t know about you.”  Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York.

“Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.” Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible.

“At the start of the twentieth century, death by electricity was a relatively recent form of capital punishment.” Harold Schechter, The Devil’s Gentleman: Privilege, Poison, and the Trial that Ushered in the Twentieth Century.

“The play—for which Briony had designed the posters, programs and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in crêpe paper—was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch.” Ian McEwan, Atonement.

“Shortly after midnight on July 18, the great bell high in the campanile of the church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel on 115^th Street announced to East Harlem that the day of festa had begun.” Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115^th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950.

“When Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams one morning, he found that he had been transformed in his bed into an enormous bug.” Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis.

“After graduating college, I worked downtown in the immense shadows of the World Trade Center, and as part of my freewheeling, four-hour daily lunch break I would eat and drink my way past these two giants, up Broadway, down Fulton Street, and over to the Strand Book Annex.” Gary Shteyngart, Little Failure: A Memoir.

“I had the story, bit by bit, from various people and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.” Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome.

“Once upon a time, the Flatiron Building was a member of my family.” Alice Sparberg Alexiou, The Flatiron: The New York Landmark and the Incomparable City that Arose with It.

“It is a little remarkable that—although disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends—an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.